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From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: 25 Classic Books That Have Been Banned
Date: Wed, 28 May 2025 14:22:28 -0400 (EDT)
Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000)
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Mike Van Pelt  <usenet@mikevanpelt.com> wrote:
>The standards for reliability of ancient documents are:
>
>1) Number of copies of the documents
>2) How well the copies agree with each other
>3) How close in time the earliest copies are to the events.
>
>By all of these standards, compared to the New Testmanent,
>how do, say, the works of Tacitus, Cicero, Julius Caesar rate?
>
>Not remotely close.  The works collected in the New Testament
>blow them all away by these tests of reliability.

I think a better test of reliability is to know how well a 
document agrees with other unrelated documents of the same
era.  The NT is a mixed bag in this regard.

>This is utter nonsense.  Nobody (except a few ... non
>mainstream types ...) thinks the Bible originated with
>the translators hired by King James.  I'm talking about
>the originals, written mostly in Koine Greek, one or two,
>I think may be written in Aramaic.

Nobody who actually knows about the Bible, but you would be shocked to
see how many people in the various Southern Protestant traditions believe
that the KJV is the only possible translation and that the translators of
the KJV were able to correct errors in the documents they were working 
from, because they were sustained by God.

There is a dramatic difference between people trained at the Yale School
of Divinity and the people trained at Hooterville Bible College.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."